She laughed. “Because he did.”
“How’d you reel him in, then?” I asked, and then quickly added, “Oh, wait, what was I thinking? I know exactly how you got him to commit.”
She pointed an accusing finger in my direction. “Don’t fucking say it.”
“No words need to be said,” I answered with a smile. “You already made it known that blow jobs are your most favorite thing in the world. I’d guess a woman who loves giving head that much can pretty much get any man to commit.”
“You’re deranged. I hate you.”
“I love you, too,” I said and blew her a kiss. “But I seriously hate that goddamn hat.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed in outrage. “What’s wrong with my hat?”
“It’s bigger than the beach umbrella Mom is using.”
“Shut up. I love this hat.”
“I just want to know one thing about that hat.”
“And what’s that?”
“Did you get the president’s approval to wear it?” I asked with a sarcastic smirk. “I mean, no doubt, it has to be affecting radio frequency. It might even be interfering with satellites in space.”
“You’re such an asshole,” she muttered and I laughed.
She threw her hat at me, and I snagged it out of the air and slid it over my hair.
“Annie?!” I exclaimed and held my hands out in front of me and gestured like I didn’t know where I was or how to get from Point A to Point B. “Annie! Where are you? Who turned off the sun? I can’t see anything! Oh, my God! Help!”
A second later, a bottle of sunscreen hit me square in the stomach.
God, I loved riling Annie up, and more than that, I loved that my sister had the power to distract me from all of the bad things rolling around in my head. Even when she was the biggest pain in my ass, she was still my best friend.
Best friend.
Those words shouldn’t have spurred pain, but they did.
At one point, I would’ve considered Reed my best friend.
But now, I wasn’t sure if he was anything but an excruciating memory of what could have been.
My sister was a smart woman. She was swift in her conclusions and just in the judgments she made to come to them.
I’d never fully understood. Christ, maybe I’d never really bothered to look. I’d seen her as my sister, and I’d appreciated all of the things that combined to make her on a surface level, but I hadn’t really comprehended what she had to offer.
This disease, though, had started at the root—deep inside me and the skewed interpretation I’d made of the man I was.
I told myself I was happy. I told myself I was forward-thinking. I told myself I was helping the people around me and myself at the same time, but the rot was at the root.
I told myself. I told.
And I, Reed Luca, was a pathological liar.
I lied without reason or benefit, and in the end, the consequences, as expected, were beyond detrimental.
With the weighty column that had woken me up after repeated rereads last night—bolstered by my sister’s perspective, of course—in the back pocket of my dark-wash jeans, I’d put on a button-down shirt in some farfetched attempt to convey the importance of the occasion and even used some gel to tame my hair.
Facing my execution block a week and a day after our last contact, I lifted my hand and banged out a shaky rhythm on Lola’s door.
It didn’t even open before she started trying to get rid of me.
“Go away.”
God, I missed her voice, even the pissed-off and irritated version that only she could pull off and still sound adorable.
My forehead dropped forward to the cool wood, and I closed my eyes. “Lola.”
“No habla ingles,” her soft voice called back, muffled only by the surface in between us. Actually, I pictured her in much the same position as my own.
“Tu hablas español?” I asked hopefully. Anything to get her to talk to me.
The door left my face in a rush as she yanked it open out from under me. I stumbled inside, but I used the clumsy moment to my advantage by grabbing her by the hips, walking her backward, and slamming the door with my foot in one smooth movement.
“You speak Spanish?” she snapped as I sat her ass down on her own couch.
“A very, very small amount.” It didn’t take a detective to realize that being fluent in a second language wasn’t going to win me any bonus points. And I wasn’t anyway.
“What are you doing here, Reed?”
“We’re dating.”
She didn’t mince words. “Are we?”
Her intention was pain, and the accuracy was spot-on. I knew I’d royally botched things, but the idea that I wouldn’t be able to fix it made a blinding pain shoot from one side of my chest to the other. “Of course we are.”
Her eyes were cold, reserved, and resolute. She’d had time to build up her defenses, and she’d used it wisely. “You might be sure, but I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“It is that simple.”
“We’ve never even discussed it!”
“We didn’t have to.”
She sighed heavily, and it wasn’t of the dreamy and swoon-like variety. It was the kind of sigh your lungs released when your body had reached its maximum toleration and had no other option but to find a way to release the tension. “There you go with your declarations. Maybe you didn’t have to, Reed, and maybe I didn’t have to before. But now I do. Okay? Now, I do.”
“Okay,” I conceded easily, willing to ride the wave as long as it broke in my favor. “Let’s discuss it, then.” This wasn’t a battle that could be settled without an explanation on my part.
“Why didn’t you go on the trip with my family?”
I opened my mouth to speak when she cut me off. “The truth. Not some existential bullshit or the thing you want me to hear or the thing you think gets you out of trouble. I know you’re good at making up stories, but I’ve never been fooled. Why didn’t you come?”
I nearly smiled at the conditions and the deep, meaningful things it said she knew about me, but my lips refused to cooperate. They knew there wasn’t anything to be happy about until Lola’s lips were pushed up against them.
“You caught me off guard,” I admitted. “With Brandon and the divorce and having just lost the job at the Journal. And hell, I don’t know. I’m not used to having plans, Lo. Expectations.”
“Oh my God, I hate that word.”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Your sister is great, I like everything about you and her, but introducing me to your parents didn’t seem like it would work out well for me. For us.”
She rolled her eyes and pushed up off the couch to standing. I followed her to my feet as she paced in front of me. “You were going to have to meet my parents eventually, Reed. You’re thirty-one, for fuck’s sake. It’s time to grow up.”
“See?” I accused, perhaps unwisely. “You sound just like my father. So I can only imagine what your father would have to say.”
“I’m pretty sure it would have been along the lines of ‘Don’t eat all the mashed potatoes, Reed.’ He’s not ex-CIA, for shit’s sake.”
No matter how I coached myself, I couldn’t seem to get my point across.
It wasn’t that I was worried for me. I was worried for her.
What would she think if her boyfriend couldn’t make some pseudopositive impression on the most important people in her life? How would they feel about a guy who’d never held a steady job, had just lost his current one, and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day? A guy who spent most of his time alone until their daughter had come along and who barely had any clean laundry?
Jesus. Even I didn’t think I was a catch anymore.
“I’m not what they expect, and I’m not what you did either.”
She shoved me in my chest, and I tingled at her touch, even as aggressive as it was. I missed it. I missed her. “How the hell do you know what I think?”
“Because you tell me.”
“Well, I told you that I liked you, that you meant something to me, and I told you that I wanted you to come. If you’re such a good listener, you should have heard that shit too.”
Goddammit, this was not going well.
I leaned forward to touch my mouth to hers, but she wasn’t receptive at all. I hadn’t expected her to be, but if verbal communication was going this poorly, I thought maybe physical communication would go better.
I was wrong.
“Lo.”
“You know what, Reed? There’s a difference in doing what’s expected and doing something for someone you care about.”
I was taken aback for long enough that she took my silence in the complete opposite way it was intended.
“God, I thought I was someone you cared about. I guess I really had it all fucking wrong. I guess I was just another one of your experiments with life, huh?”
“No!” I shook my head vehemently. “That’s so off base. You know that’s off base. You’re projecting the last few days on the entirety of our relationship—”
“Shut up. Just…shut up. I need time to think.”
“You need time to put distance between us,” I countered, losing my cool over the prospect of not seeing her for days on end again.